What I want in Oracle Fusion

PeopleSoft Internet Architecture brought the Internet “Look and Feel” to our application, because of which I always compare the application front-end to the best websites that I come across in the internet. Few of these websites need not be the best but still they are the once that I frequent. I want my application to match these websites. In this post I’ll list out certain features which I badly need in my application.

First, I check my emails regularly on Yahoo. I can do it in the following ways,

1. Go to http://www.yahoo.com/ and then click the “mail” option available on that webpage. After which I sign on to my email account.
2. Go to http://www.google.com/ and search for “yahoo mail” and then reach the desired webpage and log on to my account.
3. After I reach http://mail.yahoo.com/ in any of the above mentioned methods I can add it to “Favorites”. When I need access to the webpage the next time I can reach it by using my Favorites.
4. Go to http://mail.yahoo.com/ and sign on to my account.

Option 1 will be the most undesirable option as it involves these disadvantages,

1. I have to wait for the http://www.yahoo.com/ page to open on my system before I can choose the “mail” option. Then wait for the Mail page to open.

2. It involves two steps to be performed by the end-user, Step 1 to type the url in the address bar and Step 2 to Click the “Mail” option

Option 2 should have been the worst nightmare to imagine (I’m not against Search Engines, kindly read on…), but I keep it lower than Option 1 because there could be instances where I forget the address of both the home page and the intended page, our Search Engines come in handy when this happens. PeopleSoft did provide you this option with the Verity Search Engine.

Option 3 is good but not the “best” (According to me!), because it is only a while before “My Favorites” gets clogged making it unreadable and unusable. PeopleSoft provides this option. I want them to look at the next.

Option 4 is the “best” option available (According to me! I insist this because applications should cater to the needs and requirements of all users). You can achieve this in PeopleSoft if you remember a variety of components that form the building blocks of a PeopleSoft url (Not very attractive!). I see two ways in which this can be implemented.

1. When we log on to PeopleSoft application we see a standard DHTML Tag containing the links to “Home” and “Sign Out” options. PeopleSoft can add an address box to this along with a “Go” button and let the user type the address of the page that he wants to visit. The user can type in “LEV_REQUEST” and access his Leave Request page. Fortunately the PNLGRPNAME field is unique. PeopleSoft can do this by a combination of SQLEXEC and a simple transfer function on the Field Change event of the button “Go”. The page will not load if the user does not have proper permissions to access the component.

2. The other option is to enable our application server to accept a parameter from the address url and manipulate on it to determine the page intended by the user. Eg: To access leave request component (LEV_REQUEST), the user types in the url as https://lev_request.my.peoplesoft.com/, where the standard url used by the user to access the application is https:\\my.peoplesoft.com and the component which he intends to access is LEV_REQUEST. I’m not certain about this option being viable as I’ve NEVER done network programming neither do I completely understand the way the Web Server and App Server function. I only believe that it is possible.
   

Am I done? No not yet, there is one more function which I desire, “Remember my Password” option. Although my password manager can do this, it would be of great help if the Application can provide me with this option. I’m certain that the “classical” Security experts will not agree with this, but this is MY requirement.

If I ever succeed building an ERP (MY ERP), I’ll ensure these features are packaged with it.